Adam Savage of Mythbusters basically busted the myth of RFID security – and the Discovery Channel wouldn’t air the segment. Here he talks at the HOPE conference about the experience.

Another year, another PAX Omegathon. After a year of theories and a whole lot “ZOMG Do you know what the final round is?” murmur, the final round game iiiiiis: VS Excitebike!

We’ll have tons of pics and happenings as soon it’s all wrapped up.
Update: Uploading. Joey Geko, the underdog whose name they drew randomly at the door at the beginning of PAX, has triumphed. He wins a trip to the Tokyo Game Show and five grand (!).

An anonymous tipster has confirmed that a major T-Mobile press conference is scheduled for October 23 in LA or NYC in anticipation of a full G1 launch. That’s right, folks: the Android phone is coming. To recap, the G1 is a rebadged HTC Dream from T-Mobile. We have full coverage here but we know the following:

First off, that “chin” that’s got everyone talking is allegedly called a “kicktail” and the slide mechanism is considered an “arc slider screen“. How that works isn’t clear yet, but we want to see it in action.

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Just a couple more pics for you guys before we enter the belly of the beast again. These TF2 cosplayers were all over the place, but I didn’t see any Heavies. Well, there were some heavies all right, but to be precise I didn’t see anybody dressed as a heavy from TF2.
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The DID-FS Digital Folding Screen from Daewoo is a 4-panel room divider that integrates 4 separate LCD video displays. Each screen can be fed independently of the rest, so you can really go to town with this display array. Play all your video game systems at once, or perhaps watch four different shows. Hell, set up a camera to keep track of what’s happening on the other side. Point a camera at a window and quadruple the windows in your cramped little apartment. The possibilities are endless I tells ya.

via Dvice

As long as we’re talking about certain people who should be kicked in the balls for making bad movies about technology products, let’s add Aaron Sorkin to the mix. He’s thinking of making a movie about, you guessed it, Facebook.

If Sorkin goes through with this wonderful (eye-roll) idea, I’m sure it’ll be a really great movie (double eye-roll). He sounds like he’s just the guy to make the film, too (triple eye-roll) as he says on his own Facebook group “I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I’ve started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she’s been dead for 33 years.” In other news, I’ll be writing a movie about break dancing after I learn what “popping and locking” means.

To be fair, Sorkin has been behind some pretty dynamite shows; The West Wing and Sports Night, to name a couple. And the movie will apparently be about the story behind Facebook, which I guess could be kind of interesting. Hopefully they’ll tap Dustin Diamond (Screech on Saved by the Bell) to play Mark Zuckerberg.

[via PC World]

Green marketing may be hitting a saturation point. At least, I’ve come to think that at some point it will. Is it now? I don’t know. It just seems to me that all marketing pushes eventually run out of gas. I would hate to see Green-thinking fall away as just another fad, because advertisers shoved it down our collective throat.
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Our former writer and good friend Mike Kobrin now lives in New Orleans. Keep him and NOLA in your thoughts tonight.

At some point we are going to run into the issue of media players just cutting their way out of our pockets. You’ll have to buff the edges so you don’t slice your fingers off while changing tracks. I guess we’re not quite at that point, but 4.5mm is pretty damn thin. This thing doesn’t have much branding, and I’m not sure I can count on a place called “Component Warehouse” for support if my player snaps in half during shipment, but it’s all worth it to take off that last 2mm.

We have here what appear to be some actual, big-boy shots of the impending T-Mobile HTC Dream. You know, the Android phone? As always, take these types of things with a grain of salt, although these photos do look pretty convincing. The shots were grabbed from a Chinese-language forum and sent to Engadget. My Chinese isn’t all that good, considering I’ve never been there, spoken the language, or learned to read the many and varied symbols. These photos should be worth a couple thousand words in any language, though.

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Behold! PAX in pictures. There will be more later, I’m taking a photo every other step. There are cosplayers, nerds, enforcers, classy ladies, and everything in between. Click through for our first batch of PAX-y stills.

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Microwave cookology keeps getting better and better. Back in the day, one would just throw whatever in the box and nuke it ‘till done. Problem with that was that many meals turned out soggy and unevenly cooked. Some meals turned out better than others, but ultimately nothing ever browned, which gives food good ol’ deliciousness.

Eventually microwaveable pizzas showed up on the scene and brought the necessity to be able to crisp and brown foods. Nobody wants a soggy pizza. Methods and materials have progressed from odd silver-lined boxes to browning plates and even browning bags.
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Brother has come out with a wide format printer for only 200 bucks. The MFC-5890CN is part of the ‘Professional Series’ line of Brother all-in-one printers. Combining the capability to print, scan, fax and copy the company is marketing these for business users who would like the ability to make ledger size prints.

Big prints make for a better impact in any presentation, and pretty pictures to hang on the wall are no exception. I don’t know how these would hold up for photo printing, but considering the price it might be worth checking out. Big 11″x17″ prints have always been a pretty sweet size for prints.

Also announced was the MFC-5490CN for $129, which handles the same tasks, but only prints up to 8.5”x14”. The wide format MFC-5890CN will be available in September and the MFC-5490CN goes on sale in October. Pictured is the MFC-6490CW, the currently available all-in-one from the ‘Professional Series’.

Brother via Blast Magazine.

Our growing army of rapidly depleting mobile devices are spawning all manner of methods to power them back up again. You got your standard car chargers, your solar powered varieties; there is even a charge-by-motion that will soon (someday) be available. It just makes sense that we can now also add a pen into the mix.

The One Battery Mobile Charger Pen supplies one AA battery worth of external juice. Attach pen to phone, let it charge and you (apparently) got yourself 20 hours of stand-by time or two hours of talk time.

Five different adapters are included, and yes the pen works. Since the pen is bigger than most cell phones it seems a bit awkward to carry around, but it should make for a good thing to keep in a bag or backpack.

Gadget4all via Pocket-lint

The future just got a whole lot less bleak. The impending and unavoidable robot takeover may not be as damaging to humankind as we once feared. At least not if they keep making ‘em out of styrofoam. Hell, these Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots could annihilate each other and nobody would even notice except for a select few in the packaging industry.

Aside from the eventual robot uprising, we still have to construct them to get to that point, right? Well, Kevin Kelly and his son have been working on a robot made from five years’ worth of saved styrofoam. Armed with foam cutters and a silicon sealant, the pair cut and shaped, glued and assembled the pieces until their robot took form. Comprised of five main sections, the Styrobot disassembles easily for shipping to any place where styrofoam creatures happen to be in need of robot overlords.

Looks like it, according to CEO Jimbo. What RED does is a little over my head, but I know they do some crazy RAW compression and shoot in 5K, Epic, or something ridiculous like that. It’s superduberjuber high definition. Check out Jimbo’s little message to the RED forums and let your mind drift into some dream world where this news will make you happy. Down there like it does for Devin. ROFL.

The primary advantage to RED is REDCODE. Compressed RAW at over 23.976 fps. This is a core invention of RED that’s full effects have not been seen yet.

The secondary advantage of RED is our sensor program. Some could argue that this is number one.

Mysterium “Monstro” is a sensor program that pushes the envelope past anything on the horizon. It will go into Epic, and another camera aimed squarely at the DSLR market. Epic ships with Mysterium-X and has a free upgrade to Monstro.

Scarlet has been talked about extensively. It is a 3K, 120fps camera with a built-in 8X zoom that starts at 28mm (full frame still 35mm) wide angle. The T-stop will be “at least” as published.

We have a couple of other “tricks up our sleeves”. The important message is that we are just getting started.

Jim

There was a time when the CD was the saving grace of the computer and media world. No longer would it take 22 floppy disks to install Windows 95. Oh no, just one magical disk. But as everything digital, things change overtime, and so optical formats are now loathe as the bastard child you wouldn’t dare get rid of, but can’t stand the sight of him nor his loser friends.

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I mentioned it in an earlier post, but as it all went down while I was in the middle of swappin’ out cameras, I missed getting this little gem on video. Fortunately, ye olde Tube of Yous has come through.

To explain what you’re seeing: About halfway through his set, Coulton pushed an iDVD-built video menu to the concert hall’s projection screens. It had two items: one labeled “Play this one”, one labeled “Not this one”. After a few rounds of playful banter between Coulton and a sound guy whos name he simply couldn’t remember, they managed to tag-team the audience into chanting for the not-to-be-played video (The camera used in that video up above didn’t quite pick up just how loud the chant was – people were pretty riled up). “Sound Guy” clicks the no-no video, aaaaaand it’s a rickroll.

There were a few thousand people in that concert hall. Could this be the largest simultaneous Rickroll in the history of the intarwebs?

You hear that rumble? Thats an army of geeks, gettin’ down so damn hard that the very walls around us were beginning to crumble.

Okay, fine – it’s just a nasty bit of clipping caused by the compact-car sized subwoofers lining the edges of the stage. They were inescapable. Wherever we stood, it was like the subs were in our camera. Sounded amazing in person; on film, not quite as nice.

Read on for impressions of the set and a shot of the crowd showing off their gadget collection.

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I had the best spot in the house, standing on a nice sturdy chair staring down the 10x zoom lens of an HD camera from about 15 feet from the stage. Then the battery died on the camera and security kicked me off my chair, simultaneously.

After egging the audience into rickrolling themselves, Jonathan brought Felicia Day (who, by the way, we’ll be spending a few minutes with tomorrow afternoon for a quick Q&A) of The Guild and Dr. Horribles Sing-Along Blog to be the voice of GlaDOS. Too friggin’ awesome.

Update: Second (and, yes, quite a bit better) video after the jump:
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